Bill C-39 is a massive corporate giveaway

On September 21, the federal government introduced Bill C-39, a major piece of legislation that they’re calling An Act respecting certain measures to strengthen the economy. Despite the vague name, the bill contains a wide array of major changes to federal law, on issues ranging from climate to Indigenous rights to the right to strike and the approval of infrastructure. 

The government is framing the bill as part of its agenda to “build Canada strong,” a slogan that federal policy-makers never tire of trotting out. But will this proposed law—the largest piece of legislation yet introduced in this session—actually strengthen the Canadian economy?

When we look at the details, it becomes clear that the main purpose of this legislation—much like the rest of the federal government’s policy agenda—is about clearing the way for greater corporate profit, at the expense of everything else. In this case, the feds are offering up the environment, First Nations, and workers to the bulldozer. 

Climate: Standards? What standards?

It comes as little surprise, given the systematic dismantling of Canada’s climate policy over the past 18 months, but the federal government would really prefer that we not talk about climate change in the context of Bill C-39. The term “climate” does not appear in the government’s backgrounder promoting the bill at all. The bill itself includes only obligatory references to existing climate commitments, which are framed as one consideration among many for determining project approvals.

Instead, Bill C-39 chips away at various environmental protections that currently exist in the Impact Assessment Act, Canadian Environmental Protection Act, Species at Risk Act, Fisheries Act and Canadian Navigable Waters Act. Generally speaking, these changes:

• Accelerate assessment timelines, which means less fulsome reviews;
• Give federal ministers more power to unilaterally approve project proposals; and,
• Privilege commercial considerations when setting project conditions.

Taken together, the changes in Bill C-39 will make it easier to approve new oil pipelines and other projects with significant environmental impacts. The bill even allows the environment minister to permit limited construction activities on major projects before environmental assessments are complete.

The biggest red flag in the bill, however, is the designation of “regions of national interest”—geographic areas in which proposed projects may bypass the usual assessment processes. While the bill does not name any regions specifically, it is easy to imagine which parts of the country the federal government may be keen to label as sacrifice zones, including Ontario’s Ring of Fire, Alberta’s oil sands and various B.C. pipeline corridors.

Canada is already 20 years behind on its climate goals, with no plan to meet the 2050 net-zero target. Bill C-39, if implemented, would make it even harder to turn things around.

—Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, CCPA senior researcher. Thank you to Julia Levin at Environmental Defence Canada for sharing insights on these changes.

Indigenous rights: Steps backward for nation-to-nation relationships

The federal government has a constitutional duty to consult and accommodate First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples when projects may affect their rights. The government says Indigenous groups have called consultations burdensome, duplicative and difficult to navigate. Bill C-39’s answer is consolidation: one consultation process per project, per Indigenous community.

Streamlining consultations does little to address the underlying problem of how these processes are ultimately structured and who carries the burden. Indigenous nations are repeatedly asked to assess project impacts and share generations of knowledge about their territories, within timelines and rules designed by non-Indigenous governments and project developers. Impact assessments, which are supposed to identify a project’s impact on communities and the environment, have historically centred Western science. Indigenous perspectives contributed within those frameworks can be taken out of context or treated as a supplement. 

The bill calls its approach a “strengthened Crown consultation,” yet it gives Nations no new authority nor resources.

Meaningful consultation requires that First Nations have the time and capacity to gather evidence and deliberate when their communities and lands could be permanently altered. The one-year timeline can be paused for consultation, but the crown decides when. The bill also lets the minister authorize early site work before an impact assessment decision. Once work begins, changing or stopping a project becomes more difficult. 

These provisions are drawing concerns from Indigenous leaders. Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak has warned the government against rushing the bill through parliament. The AFN is also seeking legal counsel, a sign that First Nations may be gearing up for a legal fight. 

Litigation means uncertainty. The bill undermines its own promise: Ottawa cannot offer investors certainty while sidestepping its obligations to rights holders. 

—Rachel Pettigrew, CCPA research assistant

Labour: Frontal attack on the right to strike

The labour movement has been on alert for months about potential coming restrictions on the right to strike among federally regulated workplaces. The feds engaged in a “consultation” earlier this summer that was poorly advertised and hastily concluded—generally a sign that policy-makers have already made a decision about which direction they’re planning to take.

That decision is now on the table with Bill C-19. The legislation does a lot of things, but “reforms” to Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code are relevant here—that is, the feds’ most prized piece of strike-breaking legislation (the latest tool in a long history of Canadian government strikebreaking). Section 107 of the code allows for the labour minister to unilaterally order a work stoppage to end in order to secure “industrial peace.” It has been the subject of a major backlash from Canadian workers, most notably when Air Canada workers ignored the law and engaged in an “illegal” strike after being ordered back to work in 2025.

The reforms, according to labour minister Patty Hajdu, would create “guardrails” around federal use of Section 107. Sounds positive, right? Except those “guardrails” mostly revolve around a simple requirement that the feds declare ending the labour stoppage to be in the “national interest.” How would that be determined? Well by the labour minister, of course. 

Previous iterations of Section 107 were subject to union court challenges, which threatened to undo the feds’ favourite tool entirely, and these changes would likely nullify those challenges, forcing the process to begin anew. More importantly, it would also formalize the minister’s unilateral power to break strikes, since that power previously rested on a somewhat novel (one might even say strained) interpretation of the Canada Labour Code. Now that power would be fully formalized and more difficult to legally challenge.

All this together amounts to an unprecedented attack on the right to strike—and would make Canada’s government strikebreaking powers the most significant of any G7 country by far. A wide variety of labour unions have condemned the proposal, and many are promising court challenges against it. The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), the largest union in Canada by membership, has gone farther—the union’s national executive board has unanimously declared, in no uncertain terms, that it intends to defy the law if it is applied to a CUPE strike.

—Jon Milton, CCPA editor and chair of the Trade Union Research Collective (TURC)

A bill of rights for corporate power 

The message from the federal government is quite clear: everything is on the menu. By making C-39 their signature piece of legislation for this parliamentary session, this government is signalling that the door is wide open for every one of corporate Canada’s demands, no matter the impact on the rest of the population. 

The federal government is, of course, framing these measures as necessary actions to bolster the Canadian economy in the face of a belligerent United States. But if a strong economy means weak workers, we should probably ask ourselves: whose economy are we talking about?

There are multiple ways to build “Canada strong,” as the feds love to say. Protecting the environment that we depend on, making sure that workers are able to fight for dignity at work, and strengthening the government’s relationship with First Nations are all strengths, too—no matter what the business lobby says.